From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small

Going Home

Wednesday, August 27th, 2014

Let us suppose, Fred Reed suggests, that you, the reader, are an average white cop in, say, Washington, DC:

Just as the public doesn’t like you, you will not much like the public. Cops do not see humanity at its best. The young woman hiking her skirt up at traffic stops. Couples screaming obscenities at each other on domestic-violence calls. “Why don’t you catch real criminals?” The lies. The excuses. The lame attempts at manipulation. The threats (“I know the mayor.”)

As a real cop on real streets, you learn never to smile, to maintain an implied aggressiveness. When riding with a reporter, you will joke and tell stories. With the public, you will learn to be wooden-faced and authoritarian. You can’t lose your dominance or you are useless.

A few months on the streets will take the bloom off your dewy rose of morn.

[Gruesome stories elided.]

As a reporter, I saw all of these things. Not similar things, but exactly these. They are not imaginary. They will change your attitude toward humanity. It won’t make you better company.

And nobody but another cop, or someone in the street trades — police, fire, ambulance–will understand. Your wife won’t, and this won’t improve the marriage. Divorce rates are high among cops.

With time, your views on police brutality will become ambivalent, or not ambivalent. You will see the pretty blonde rape victim, fifteen, about due for her first prom, screaming and screaming and screaming, sobbing and choking, while the med tech tries to get a sedative into her arm. And you will hear the cop next to you, hand clenching hard on his night stick, say in cold fury, “I hope the sonofabitch resists arrest.” Yeah, you may find yourself thinking, yeah. Social theories are nice. The streets are not theoretical.

And you will find that the perps are almost always black. If you are a good liberal, you won’t like this, but after three months on the street you will not have the faintest doubt. If you are a suburban conservative out of Reader’s Digest, you will be surprised at the starkness of the racial delineation.

All cops know this. They know better than to say it. This can be tricky for black cops, especially if former military who believe in law and order.

You will find that there are white cops who knock blacks around, who humiliate them. You will think it wrong, and so will many of your fellows, but you will decide not to turn them in. You have twenty more years on the streets with them. You will discover that black cops exist who also mistreat blacks, and this will confuse you.

You will find yourself contributing to bad race relations by enforcing laws you think stupid, pointless and unwise — hassling blacks for drinking a beer on the sidewalk with friends, rolling dice for quarters on the hood of a car, or smoking a joint. Never mind that a black city government made the laws.

Depending on your background when you, the reader, suddenly became a cop, you may or may not have some grasp of how guns work in the city. To begin with (if you think about it at all) you will realize that cops are not very competent with guns. In an entire career most will never fire their weapons on duty. To be good with a pistol requires hours and hours on the range and thousands of rounds. These cost money. Departments have higher priorities. Competent tactical shooting requires much more training. You won’t get it.

As a fresh cop, you will notice that the standard editorial notion, that cops are heavily armed brutes amid a helpless unarmed populations, isn’t quite accurate. When you are on the sidewalks of a bad neighborhood, where you know you are disliked by all and hated by many, you will become aware of your vulnerability. You have to pass close to people. Any of them could blow your head off from behind, stick an ice pick in your back, or brain you with a piece of rebar.

The second thing to know about the police and guns (though it sounds unrelated) is something you will hear often from your new colleagues: “I’m going home tonight.” This does not mean, “I’m going home instead of to the bar with buddies.” It means, “If some dirtball threatens my life, or credibly seems to be doing so, I will blow his sorry ass away before I’ll let my wife have to explain to the kids why Daddy is never coming home again.”

Ah, but how do you know when your life is in danger? Therein lies the rub. In a good department, you will get shoot-no-shoot training. It will surprise you. You stand in front of a very large screen, your weapon holstered. On the screen (for example) appears in video exactly what you would see responding to an armed-robbery call at a small store. A woman, the proprietor’s wife, frantically accosts you. “He robbed us! He has a gun! He went into the alley.” Gun in hand, you run down the alley, scared and breathing hard. A man with a gun turns the corner, gun in shooting position. You fire. You just killed the proprietor who also was chasing the perp with his own gun.

Back on the real street. A 250-pound guy crazy on PCP charges you with the clear intention of doing you harm. How much harm? He could kill you. It isn’t part of your job description to find out. You don’t have time in three seconds to try pepper-spray (which doesn’t work well on PCP heads anyway) or send for a Taser, or shout, “Halt in the name of the law, oh evil emissary of the forces of chaos!”

So this was probably the first time I truly got a taste of how bad it’s gotten, how far society has slipped, how poisoned the populace has become with entitlements. Some people, out of the goodness of their hearts, tried to do something nice for some people who didn’t appreciate it in the least. Things are rapidly getting worse, but I’m ready.

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Don M.: Armor commanders in the 1970s reprimanded infantry commanders if they used reverse slope defenses: They thought with a moment’s thought they could convert from defender to attacker, and intended to dominate the enemy’s forward slope. Of course if you could attack, or had adequate fire to dominate the enemy’s forward slope, you wouldn’t be defending.

Toddy Cat: “Jones recommends six-year terms for the House and more autonomous agencies like the Fed.” Congratulations, Mr. Jones, you are a leading contender for the 2015 Mencius Moldbug award, for doing an outstanding job of identifying a real problem, and then coming up with an utterly inadequate or unworkable solution!

Victor: With an incumbency rate greater than 90%, I think House members already have six year terms, if not more.

Dan Kurt: Democracies self destruct. Fiddling with the machinery is just moving the deck chairs on the Titanic after it hit the berg.

Letters in a Box: The problem is that over time, the system becomes more and more gamed as it is more and more understood. There should be an injection of randomness somehow in order to make it somewhat unpredictable. There should be constitutionally mandated lotteries inserted into the system somewhere, somehow, at some random times. I’m not enough of a wonk to know where, or how, but I can picture maybe a random 6 year term for some office holders, or having jury members (that have not been...

Lu An Li: The moment I read this article I think of Calvin Perry III and his interrogation. Young man accused of a mass murder in Ft. Wayne IN. Calvin finally hung himself before being charged for the murders. Confessed freely and openly and it was all recorded on video and audio. Seen this video and heard the audio and it was remarkable how easily the man gave it all up. The experts on interrogations all agree that the interrogation was text book perfect and ought to be used as a training tool for...

Tim: Interesting, but what about the moral fortitude of the “accused.” Personally I wouldn’t admit to anything as an innocent person. Make a credible threat against my family and I would take the fall since protecting them has a higher value than protecting myself.

J.D. Saunders: Psych studies in all this were conducted 40–50 years ago, roughly during the period between Milgram’s seminal “Obedience to authority” study and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Cult indoctrination methods and standard interrogation methods were thoroughly researched. Little has changed in the interim.